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Throughout the 19th Century, chemists tried to organise the known elements so as to reflect similarities in their properties. In 1864, the British chemist John Newlands (1837–1898) arranged the elements in order of increasing atomic weight. He noticed that elements with similar physical and chemical properties occurred after each interval of seven elements (the inert gases were still unknown). He likened this periodicity to the musical scale, but his "Law of Octaves" was initially ridiculed [1].